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Archives for 2008

Through two lenses

2008/12/31 By Rob 1 Comment

Last year at this time, I took a look at the US postage stamp commemorative issues of 1957. Now is time to look at the issues of 1958. Since these issues are themselves retrospective in nature — looking back at events at their 50, 100, 150 or 200 year anniversaries — we’re really look back through two lenses. We’re looking back at the world of 1958, itself looking back at the events of 1858 and 1758.

Postage stamps, like coins, throughout history, have been instruments of propaganda as much as instruments of commerce. It is said that history is written by the victors. If so, the commemorative stamps are created by the great-grand children of those victors. It is interesting to ponder what messages these stamps are delivering, what they say about the dreams and fears of 1958 America, how we romanticize our past and give a exuberantly optimistic view of progress and the future.

This 1958 stamps, from a graphic design perspective, are fascinating. We’ll see here a variety of styles, including stamps design by long-time career designers at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing as well as designs from commercial illustrators. My perception is that we had a greater range of styles back in 1958 than we have today, where now U.S. stamps have a dulling sameness to them.

First up for 1958 was this green 3-cent issue commemorating the centennial of the birth of Liberty Hyde Bailey, a botanist associated with Michigan State and Cornell University.

Aside from his scientific accomplishments, Bailey was a prolific author on horticultural topics and an accomplished prose stylist (as well as a poet). From his 1922 The Apple-Tree:

The apple is a sturdy tree. Short of trunk and short of continuous limb, it is yet a stout and rugged object, the indirectness of its branching branches adding to its picturesque quality. It is a tree of good structure. Although its limbs eventually arch to the ground, if
left to themselves, they yet have great strength. The angularity of the branching, the frequent forking, the big healing or hollow knots with rounding callus-lips, give the tree character. Anywhere it would be a marked tree, unlike any other.

The design of this issue was by Denver Gillen. Note also that Gillen, in 1939, while working in the art department at Montgomery Ward, illustrated the original Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer children’s book.

The tradition of World’s Fairs or Expo’s goes back to Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace, and perhaps before. In 1958 the Expo came to Brussels. This stamp was released on April 17th to mark the opening of Expo 58, and shows a view of the United States Pavilion. More notable, and still existing from the Expo, is André Waterkeyn‘s sculpture Atomium, a model of an iron crystal. I wonder if that was featured on any Belgian stamp this year? I know they commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Expo on a special 100 Euro coin.

James Monroe. Fifth President of the United States. The Monroe Doctrine. Monrovia, Liberia. Then I draw a blank. We probably spent all of 15 seconds on the Monroe administration when I studied American History. But I can tell you one thing about this stamp, a purple 3-cent issue released on April 28th, 1958, the bicentennial of Monroe’s birth. It was based on a Gilbert Stuart painting now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which you can see here.

Minnesota became the 32nd state, in 1858. This centenary of this event was commemorated in a stamp design by Homer Hill. I have no information on whether this was an original design or whether it was based on an existing painting or photograph. Let me know if it looks familiar. Is it an artist’s conception? Or is it an actual identifiable location? I’ve only been to Minneapolis, and it sure isn’t there.

The International Geophysical Year (IGY) invited global cooperation and coordination in the geophysical sciences. Two major accomplishments of IGY were the discovery of the Van Allen Belts and the publication of Pogo’s G.O. Fizzickle.

This stamp was designed by Ervine Metzl, using a portion of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and a coronagraph image of the Sun. This was printed via the Giori press. This is one of my favorites of 1958. I like the contrast and use of color.

Gunston Hall, the home of George Mason. Although Mason, sometimes called the “Father of the Bill of Rights” is notable in his own right, this stamp was issued to mark the bicentennial of his home, Gunston Hall.

Interestingly, George Mason University’s mascot is named “Gunston”, though he is green and furry and in general has very few Georgian architectural elements.

It is pronounced like “Mac-i-naw”. One may forgive the odd pronunciation when reminded that we are thus saved from attempting the native name, which was “Michilimackinac”. It may not be generally known outside of North American, but the state of Michigan is unique in that it formed from two non-contiguous parts, with the northern portion, called the Upper Peninsula, jutting out of Wisconsin, and sharing no land border with Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. After nearly a century of talking about it, the “Mighty Mac” finally bridged the Straights of Macinaw, allowing the Yoopers (those who live in the Upper Peninsula) and Trolls (those who live south of the bridge) to visit without the dreaded detour through the land of the Cheeseheads.

Next up is a bridge of another kind. This issue commemorates the centenary of the trans-atlantic cable which first ran from Newfoundland to Ireland.

One of the first ceremonial messages, send from President Buchanan, can be read as an early affirmation of net neutrality:

To Her Majesty Queen Victoria, Queen of Great Britain: The President Cordially reciprocates the congratulations of Her Majesty the Queen on the success of the great international enterprise accomplished by the science, skill and indomitable energy of the two countries. It is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world. In this view will not all nations of Christendom spontaneously unite in the declaration that it shall be for ever neutral, and that its communications shall be held sacred in passing their places of destination , even in the midst of hostilities?

The design is by George Gusti, better known for his magazine covers for Fortune, Time and Holiday magazines. Here he takes on classical figures — Neptune/Poseidon and an oceanid (Amphitrite?) — but with a modern, even futuristic design. In contrast, look at a more conventional depiction, a 1936 Australian stamp commemorating the laying of a cable from Australia to Tasmania. In comparison, Giusti’s design is bold, fresh and modern.

Note also the rate increase to 4-cents, which took effect August 1st, 1958. The previous rate increase, from 2 to 3-cents was in 1932.

1959, not 1958, was the big Lincoln year. 1959 was the secquicentenital (150th anniversary) of Lincoln’s birth, a year that saw several Lincoln stamp issues, as well as a new design of the reverse of Lincoln Cent. I expert we’ll see new Lincoln stamps in 2009, for the bicentential, as well as the already-announced four new designs for the penny reverse.

But 1958 was the 100’s anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It seems that every election year, the presidential debates are inevitably compared to these famous debates. But although the format may be similar in structure — statement, counter-statement and rejoinder — the scale of the Lincoln Douglas debates was much larger. They had a series of seven debates, over a period of two months. In each debate, the first candidate spoke for 60 minutes, followed by a 90 minute counter-statement by his opponent, concluding with a 30 minute rejoinder by the initial speaker. In comparison, modern presidential debates are trite affairs, little more than posturing and sound bites.

The design of this issue was by Ervine Metzl, based on an original by Joseph Boggs Beal.

Freedom of the Press. OK. We’re all in favor of that. But why commemorate it in 1958? The fundamental right is in the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791. Before that the Massachusetts Constitution (1780) and the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) also affirmed the freedom of the press. But none of this hit major anniversary dates in 1958. So what is going on here?

The real occasion of this stamp is the 50th anniversary of the founding of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri — the first journalism school in the world.

There were several regular, scheduled overland postal routes in operation in 1857-1858. James E. Birch had a line that ran from New Orleans to San Diego, and John Butterfield had a route from St. Louis to San Francisco. Butterfield’s operation proved to be the more successful, and this commemorative stamp illustrates his route in the background,

The original design for this issue was done by Bureau of Engraving and Printing veteran Charles Chickering.

Noah Webster was the dictionary guy, not to be confused with New Hampshire statesman/orator Daniel Webster. 1958 was the bicentennial of Noah’s birth. We can thank Noah for the American spelling reform of words like color, center and defense. The design, by Charles Chickering, is based on an engraving held by the National Portrait Gallery.

The 1958 Forestry Conservation stamp was designed by Rudolph Wendelin, a career artist for the U.S. Forestry Service, best known as the artist behind Smokey the Bear posters and other graphics, from 1944 to 1973.

Fort Duquesne was located in what is now Point State Park in down-town Pittsburgh. George Washington, then a Lt. Colonel in the Virginia Militia, campaigned against Fort Duquesne, unsuccessfully. Soon after the fort was set afire and abandoned by the French in the face of advancing troops lead by Brigadier General John Forbes, who then occupied what was left of the fort on November 25th, 1758. Forbes health declined soon after and he was dead three month later.

So the English victory was not great. But what warrents commemoration is that from the ashes of Fort Duquesne sprung a new fort, named for William Pitt the Elder. And Forbes named the settlement outside of Fort Pitt “Pittsborough” or as we call it today, “Pittsburgh”.

The stamp was based on figures from a 19th century engraving “Washington Raising the British Flag at Fort Du Quisne”.

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Filed Under: Philately Tagged With: 1958, George Mason University, International Geophysical Year, James Monroe

China Impressions

2008/11/24 By Rob 5 Comments

While in Beijing for the OpenOffice.org Conference (concerning which I owe you all a report), I was able to spend a little time playing the tourist. I thought I’d share some of the picture I “took”. Each of these images is an HDR image, based on 3-5 source images of the same scene, with different exposures, combined using Photomatrix software.

Although HDR techniques can be used to create realistic-looking (or nearly so) images, in these cases I intentionally step beyond literal reality and attempt an impressionist portrayal of the scene. Jet lag, no doubt, played a small part in my impressions…

First up we have a view of the terrain at Badaling, the popular section of the Great Wall near Beijing. It was a lot colder here than it was in the city, and I was woefully under-dressed. The skies were dull and gray. Standard advice in this situation is to show as little sky as possible. Otherwise you’ll get a dull, ugly, featureless swath of grey. Instead, focus on the landscape and avoid the sky. For low dynamic range photographs, this may be the case, since you cannot bring out any detail in the clouds, but with HDR you can have detail in the clouds as well as the mountains.

I might work on this shot a little more. I think re-cropping it into more equal thirds of sky, background mountains and foreground hills might work well.

Another view at Badaling. It started snowing shortly after this shot was taken.

This is the Boat of Purity and Ease, better known as the Marble Boat, famously restored by the Empress Cixi with funds that were intended for the imperial navy.

The challenge here was that the boat had vivid detail on the exterior, as well as interior details. Expose for the exterior and the interior would be underexposed, but if you expose for the interior, the exterior would be blown out. But if you combine three exposures with HDR, you can get detail all around.

This is the Seventeen-Arch Bridge at the Summer Palace. Don Harbison and I were eying this bridge for much of our visit that day, trying to figure out the ideal vantage point and time for “the shot”. It came around 5:30 that afternoon, as the sun was setting, viewing the bridge from a little strip that juts into Kunming Lake.

At the top of Longevity Hill is the Tower of Buddhist Incense (Foxiangge). This is not a posed picture. In fact, I don’t know who the subject in this photo is, but she looked so relaxed and content that I could not help but quietly steal a few pictures. Some shots take an hour to plan and compose. Others are chance and take advantage of a 10 second window of opportunity. This was of the latter variety.

This picture needs some work in Photoshop to remove the distracting cable going down the column.

This is the Bronze Ox, cast in 1755, looking back to the Tower of Buddhist Incense. I like the ripple of sunlight on the neck. But there is some serious fringing artifacts going on here, under the ears and horns. This shot can certainly be improved on. I keep it as a reminder that I need to return to Beijing and take more and better photographs.

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Filed Under: Photography Tagged With: Beijing, China, Great Wall of China, HDR, Marble Boat, Summer Palace

ODF Update

2008/10/31 By Rob Leave a Comment

Nothing of interplanetary significance to report, I’m glad to report steady progress on all fronts.

As many of you already know, standards maintenance consists of two main activities:

  1. Defect removal through the issuance of corrections to published standards (variously called “errata” or “corrigenda”, depending on your zodiacal sign)
  2. Revision, through the issuance of updated (and presumably improved) versions of the standard.

The OASIS ODF TC has been active in both maintenance activities, with some notable milestones in the past week or so on both fronts.

On the maintenance side, Wednesday 29 October saw the start of a 15-day public review for draft 3 of the ODF 1.0 Errata document. The official OASIS announcement has more information on the public review, including links to the errata document itself, as well as how the public may submit comments. JTC1/SC34, though their Secretariat, has also been invited to participate in this review.

Once the public review has concluded, and assuming that no new issues surface in the review, the ODF TC may approved and publish it as “OASIS Approved Errata” as well as transmit the text to JTC1/SC34 for application to ISO/IEC 26300.

On the revision front, the TC continues to work to complete ODF 1.2. But while finishing that revision, we decided that we also want to initiate a new activity related to the next version of ODF, the one after ODF 1.2. We did not have immediate agreement on what that version would be called (ODF 1.3? ODF 2.0?) so we started calling it “ODF-Next”. We voted to create a new Subcommittee of the ODF TC, called the ODF-Next Subcommittee to start preliminary background work on this next version, in parallel with the TC’s foreground task of completing ODF 1.2. The charter of the new subcommittee reads:

Statement of purpose
——————–
As the ODF TC completes its work on ODF 1.2, it is desirable to instantiate a parallel effort to gather requirements and define a vision for the next major revision of the standard.

It is the purpose of the ODF-Next Requirements Subcommittee to gather requirements, to categorize these requirements by theme, to prioritize these requirements, and to submit a report to the ODF TC on a recommended set of work items for the next major version of ODF, which will have the working name of “ODF-Next”.

Scope of work
————-
In accordance with the above Purpose, the ODF-Next Requirements SC would undertake the following activities:

To collect requirements for ODF-Next from TC members, from the OASIS ODF Adoption TC, from implementors, from users, from the public, and from other stakeholders;

To ensure that all requirements collected have been formally submitted as contributions to the ODF TC, either as TC member contributions or via the Feedback License;

To categorize these comments according theme;

To prioritize the themes and the requirements within the themes;

To produce and submit to the ODF TC a report on a recommended set of work items for ODF-Next

Bob Jolliffe, from the Department of Science and Technology, South Africa, has agreed to chair the Subcommittee. We had our first meeting last Tuesday.

I think this is going to be exciting. ODF 1.0 and ODF 1.1 was about mainly about encoding, in an open standard, the output of conventional productivity applications. If you are a conventional person, running a convention business, with conventional ideas looking for a conventional profit, then great, don’t let me wake you up. But I think we need to do more than that. Achieving mere conventional doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning. If I wanted to just replicate what others were doing, I’d join the Mono project.

ODF 1.2 starts to break away from that conventional view with its richer view of metadata. But with ODF-Next, we can pull significantly ahead and move into uncharted territory. As Thomas Paine wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

As you can tell, from reading the charter, our primary initial task will be to collect feedback for feature ideas for the next release of ODF. When we formally put out the call for comments, I expect a huge response. So our initial TC meeting was mainly spent discussing ways in which we can can handle a large volume of public comments, in terms of collection, categorizing and prioritizing. Once we agree on a tool to use, and set up some infrastructure to handle the load, expect to hear more on this blog, and elsewhere, about how you can submit your ideas, and help define the capabilities of the next version of ODF.

Next, I’d like to note that the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC (OIC TC) met for the first time last week (and a second time again this week). We elected Bart Hanssens of Belgium as Chair of the technical committee. Bart works for Fedict, the Belgian federal ICT agency, one of the early adopters of ODF. Companies represented on the TC include IBM, Sun, Novell, Google, Oracle, Red Hat, Sursen, Ars Aperta, and the US Department of Defense. We also have a number of individual members.

The greatest difficulty in our initial call was determining a schedule for future meetings. With participants spread out from California to Boston, Paris, Hamburg and Beijing, there is no time which is going to be easy for all of us. The best we could come up with was to meet at 1430UTC, corresponding to 0930 EST, 1530 CET, 2230 China, but 0630 PST (ouch).

In any case, the OIC TC discussions are flowing well, as we start to discuss how we engineer test cases, what data to collect for them, how to encode test metadata, etc. You can follow the discussion in the public archives of the TC’s mailing list, or even better, consider joining OASIS ($300 for an individual membership) and participate in this or any other OASIS Technical Committee.

Finally, the ODF Adoption TC has been busily preparing to host a panel discussion and workshop related to ODF interoperability at the OpenOffice.org Conference in Beijing next week. In fact, I should now stop procrastinating and get back to completing by presentations!

If you add it all up: the three ODF-related TC’s (ODF TC, ODF Adoption TC, ODF Interop and Compliance TC), we have a combined 79 members, of which 68 represent 25 different OASIS corporate or organizational entities, and the remaining 11 are individual members.

-Rob

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Filed Under: ODF

Don’t shoot until you see their eyes

2008/10/21 By Rob 3 Comments

September 18th, 2008
Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele)
Pentax K10D with 100mm macro, 1/350 at f/5.6

When I was a child, I did as children do, and chased butterflies in the fields. Forty years later the fascination, if not the boundless energy, still remains.

Is there any logic to the flight of a butterfly? It certainly is not a straight line. Are they following a physically determined path of least action, surfing unseen micro eddies or vortices in the air to conserve their energy? Or are they showing their overflowing exuberance, feasting in a field of flowers, unable to make (and adhere to) a single choice? I know, as child, I was disposed to the latter, perhaps explaining my fondness for butterfly chasing.

In any case I’m older and wiser today. I don’t chase butterflies. I photograph them. Indeed, chasing and photographing are at cross purposes and nearly incompatible. Photographing butterflies is a patient, quiet task. The technique is straightforward and consists of three easy steps:

  1. Go sit among the flowers.
  2. Don’t move.
  3. Wait.

Let the butterflies come to you. As Ptolemy crumbled before the Copernican revolution, this critical change in perspective makes all the difference. Give it a try!

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Filed Under: Photography

ODF @ OOoCon 2008

2008/10/12 By Rob 2 Comments

Ah,the relief. I can miss the silly season this year. I can turn off the TV, turn off the talk radio, turn the newspaper straight to the sports page, and altogether ignore the last month of the campaign.

Why? Because I’m attending the OpenOffice.org 2008 Conference in Beijing, November 5th-7th. Since I’ll miss election day, I’m submitting an absentee ballot, and in fact I’ve just filled it out. I predict a great increase in personal productivity from being able to sit out the remainder of the minute-by-minute saturation campaign coverage.

This will be my third OOoCon. After Barcelona last year and Lyon in 2006, the organizers this year have a tough act to follow. But from what I can see, this year is shaping up to be the “best ever”, with open ceremonies at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse (former residence of Madame Mao) and a conference sessions at Peking University.

Although the focus of the conference is OpenOffice.org, the program, the developers, the translators, promoters and users, there is also a natural overlapping interest in OpenDocument Format (ODF). Because of this, OOoCon typically is also the largest ODF conference of the year, at least based on number of ODF-related sessions.

In particular I’ll draw your attention to the following ODF-related sessions:

  • Interoperability — expectations, promises, problems and solutions (Florian Reuter)
  • OpenOffice.org and the ODF Ecosystem (Dieter Loeschky)
  • Panel Discussion — ODF Interoperability Perspectives (with representatives from IBM, Sun, Google, Novell, FEDICT, moderated by Aslam Rafee of DST)
  • ODF@WWW — An ODF Wiki (Kay Ramme)
  • OOo and ODF Accessibility (Malte Timermann)
  • The New ODF 1.2 Metadata Framework and its Support in OpenOffice.org 3 (Svante Schubert)
  • ODFDOM -the new open sourced multi-tiered API for ISO OpenDocument Format (Svante Schubert)
  • ODF Accessibility: Perspectives Past & Future (Don Harbison)
  • Introduction to SMIL and Implementation in Lotus Symphony (Yan Peng Guo /IBM)
  • Transforming and OWL Ontology to an OpenOffice Document Template (Massoud Toussi)
  • Improving ODF Applications by sharing ODF tests (Svante Schubert)
  • Enabling ODF for Social Collaboration with Composite Applications and Mashups (Santosh Kumar)
  • ODFDOM Workshop — using the new opensourced multi-tiered API for ODF (Svante Schubert)
  • Digital Signatures: A Global Challenge (Joachim Linger)

Full details are in the conference program. My pride in seeing so many good ODF-related sessions is slightly offset by the the sadness that interest in ODF has grown so much that I can not possibly attend all of these sessions.

I hope to see many old and new friends in Beijing. This is a great opportunity to continue spreading the message of open source and open standards around the globe.

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Filed Under: ODF

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